Conversational behavior reflecting interpersonal attitudes in small group interactions

Abstract

In this paper we propose a computational model for the real time generation of nonverbal behaviors supporting the expression of interpersonal attitudes for turn-taking strategies and group formation in multi-party conversations among embodied conversational agents. Starting from the desired attitudes that an agent aims to express towards every other participant, our model produces the nonverbal behavior that should be exhibited in real time to convey such attitudes while managing the group formation and attempting to accomplish the agent’s own turn-taking strategy. We also propose an evaluation protocol for similar multi-agent configurations. We conducted a study following this protocol to evaluate our model. Results showed that subjects properly recognized the attitudes expressed by the agents through their nonverbal behavior and turn taking strategies generated by our system.